


Cupidity

by E_Ingram_1941



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Death, Other, Racing thoughts, Wendigo, World War II, an introduction to characters, grave registration
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-03
Updated: 2019-09-03
Packaged: 2020-10-06 05:02:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20501321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/E_Ingram_1941/pseuds/E_Ingram_1941
Summary: Hello All,For this piece, I am sending in an introduction to two of my World War 2 Characters. Twins from Louisiana, Thomas and James Grace work as Grave Registration officers who must walk along the beaches after D-Day to pick up tags. As one of my boys does his job, he is reminded of an omen an old woman spoke of in his youth.





	Cupidity

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for coming in to take a peek at my work. I apologize for this piece being so short. These two are only a small part to a larger whole. Although they may never meet most of the characters of Nolan's Dunkirk, they were no less inspired by the film. I hope to introduce my other characters, including my RAF boys, soon. I'm open to any and all critique.

The first body is that of a young boy, who could barely be over seventeen.

“Must’ve lied on his transcripts,” Gracey tells him, passing by to another man on his left. Tommy looks down, frowning. The boy has been shot through the torso, eight holes no longer weeping. Waves crash around him, causing his lifeless body to move in a listless dance. Other corpses move as well, floating with the tide. The gate had been lifted; the Higgins Boats have gone, making their ways back to the main ships. They are distant hums in the water, and Tommy must restrain from looking around himself. He needs to focus. He has a job to do.

He pulls out his list. Reaches down to check the tags. “George T. Miller. 18370798.” He scribbles it down, along with the mother’s name, the street address. The boy stares past him, and when Tommy looks into his brown eyes, he believes he is looking into a void. Words whisper to him, groaning like tree limbs in the wind. The void speaks.

To become a wendigo, you must first consume a man.

Or this is what Old Nanny Crow tells them as she hovers over a pot of black-eyed peas. Her rhythmic stir and the smell of comfort fail to calm them as they each stare wide-eyed and still as wood. The name of the thing, the tone of her creaking voice, are omens. Neither of them speak, too afraid to disenchant whatever creature she is conjuring into their minds. The question is already there, already understood.

What is a wendigo?

“They’s creatures beyond nature’s recognition,” she tells them, “shadows that reek of gluttony an’ rot.”

Tommy is the first to think of something, or so he believes. A shapeless mass as tall as a man fills his mind. Beside him, Gracey gulps, wondering if the shadows in the creaks of their old home would consume them.

“And they’s used to be scrawny lookin' things, tall as trees. With long limbs an’ a hollowed belly. They’s so hungry they’s eat they own lips.” She looks at them as the says this, to emphasize the truth of it, then turns back to her pot. “An' for each man they’s eat, they’s grow in size. Always hungry. Never full.” Her voice holds no joke, no light-hearted banter to ease the itch of tension in the air. Her stirring becomes long, unattended nails on a tin roof, begging to be let in. It is the sound of hunger, of consumption.

Tommy speaks, finds courage where he may ought not to. “What’cha mean ‘used to’ Nanny Crow?” His voice betrays his determined expression, but it asks all the same.

Nanny Crow taps the spoon on the pot, covers it but lets the steam rise from a crack. “Now they’s shapeshifters,” she says, and sets the spoon down on the cabinet. “Now they’s look like regular men.”

“So they’s can eat more men?” Gracey tries, the quiver in his whisper nearly lost to the swelter of heat creeping in through the open windows.

She only nods, stepping through the kitchen to check on her cornbread, her ham and collard greens. Every move she makes is without sound as if she is nothing more than a specter. Her silence is unbearable, but to say anything else could summon the creature itself. Even Tommy wonders if they should perform some ritual, just to be safe.

“But they ain’t here, are they Nanny Crow?” Again, Gracey has a tremble to those words, a shrill plea for it not to be so.

But Nanny Crow is no liar. She tells them nothing as serious as this without cause. “Oh child, they’s everywhere.” She pulls out a large knife then, tuts at a spot Gracey must have missed when cleaning it the other day. She wipes at it absently with her thumb as another hand goes to pull the ham further center of the table. “Even in the streets of New Orleans.” Her carving into the ham becomes something for Tommy as he watches her in curious horror. He imagines a creature now, a man like his father, carving a chunk out of a woman, out of himself. He sees white eyes and gray teeth, biting at the flesh as it dissolves in his mouth. The wind outside becomes a howling infestation of wendigos, all trying to get in.

Tommy is near trembling when Gracey’s hand touches him, causing him to jump out of his skin. “Gracey!”

  
“Sorry.”

Nanny Crow only hums, continuing to slice up the ham. “You's both best be prepared, cos they's not afraid of green-eyed witches.” Her eyes watch them as she cuts with practiced ease. In the distance a dog howls and the slap of a tree limb on the wood of her house levels into his bones, his soul. Tommy closes his eyes, nodding.

And though the memory is one lesson of many, Tommy tries hard not to think of such monsters now as he reaches for his fiftieth body, a Benjamin Perry, no. 13480692. The boy was a Catholic, rosary clenched between alabaster hands. Tommy imagines wild onions and his own dirty fingernails, grimy from soot as he and Gracey dug for a meal. He tastes the crabapples they stole from old Griffin, remembers the hollow left behind by a stolen treat.

Then came Old Nanny Crow with her coffee ground skin and eyes like saucers of night. With her bled stories of owls and the uses of swamp grass. Attached to her were spirits and talismans, spells and salt circles. From her sang tales of decaying shadows, of the witches he and Gracey are kin to. But most importantly came the food, the comfort of care and time, of patience and nurturing. Of lessons they would carve into the tender marrow of their bones.

After the wendigo and the hollow he always felt when he ate the stolen meals, Tommy and Gracey had never stolen crabapples, or anything for that matter, from anyone ever again, too afraid to become one of the beasts themselves.

“Thomas James Grace?” A sergeant calls his name, and Tommy is stolen from his reverie. The cold and sand and decay returns. He opens his eyes.

“Sir!” He looks over to notice Gracey still chewing on the cigarette as he stares out into a void of his own. His eyes too are far, no doubt thinking of Grand Isle, of marsh and fires in the sand.

“James Thomas Grace?” No answer. The sergeant calls again. “James. Thomas. Grace?”

Tommy takes steps closer, touches Gracey on the arm, and he immediately answers the sergeant.

“S-sir!”

“Pay attention Gracey,” calls another man behind them as more names are called. Attention off of them, Tommy is left awake in the aftermath of the wendigo, of the shadows of rot hanging in the air as he reaches down. Mackenzie Blaire. 15220339. Protestant.

By the time he alone has identified and collected what was left of his 687th body, Tommy is beginning to think that wendigos were less of a creature and more of a mindset. They had to be an all-consuming disease, a thing so gluttonous that nothing could escape it. Not once they had been introduced into the war. _Disrupters of order, _Nanny Crow had told them. _All consumers of life. Of their own flesh and blood. _

What had she told them before, when their knees were settled onto the ancient wood of her house? Always hungry? Growing in size so they were never fulfilled? Starved to the point that they ate their own lips? He looks down at the boy at his knees, now digging into the wet sand. Half of his face is missing, more than likely from a shell. His lips are curled back, cheeks hollowed out, what is left of his eye sunken in. His red hair is pale now, bitten with salt and loss. But what is worse are the pictures scattered about his body, having fallen out when he collided with the earth. It is strange, to see so many bits of the young man’s life reduced to ruined photographs.

“Tommy.” Gracey comes up behind him and places a hand on his shoulder. “We gotta move to the next section of the beach. Ten minutes tops.”

He nods, swallowing and keeping his eyes down. Had they really gotten all of them? He looks over the list in his hands, damp from the spray of wind on the water. He thinks of all the dead boys he has picked up now, collected in his bag in the forms of tags and tokens, things barely big enough to hold such weight. He thinks of all the telegrams that will need to be written, impersonally delivering a death. Images of weeping mothers and grief swollen fathers sliver across his mind, of wives and children, left alone to a wendigo’s teeth.

Standing, his mind goes to men consuming one another, never satisfied, until there is nothing left. His legs are numb, his pants clinging to the soaked skin of his calves. Bodies, colorless and young and yet old sit around him, some floating, others laying, all eerily still. Something stands on the distant horizon, tall and lanky and quivering with the need to consume. Taking out a cigarette and lighting it, Tommy pulls on it until his lungs are filled with smoke. On the exhale, he believes that war is started by wendigos: by creatures trying to escape their own rot.


End file.
